Michel de Montaigne

“ Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it;
would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay, when we frame the image
of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful
epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness,
'morbidezza': a great testimony of their consanguinity and
consubstantiality. The most profound joy has more of severity than
gaiety, in it. The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the
grave than of the merry:
"Ipsa felicitas, se nisi temperat, premit." ”

“ The feebleness of our condition is such that things cannot, in their
natural simplicity and purity, fall into our use; the elements that we
enjoy are changed, and so 'tis with metals; and gold must be debased with
some other matter to fit it for our service. Neither has virtue, so
simple as that which Aristo, Pyrrho, and also the Stoics, made the end of
life; nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture
useful to it. Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one
exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience ”

“ It is likewise true, that for the use of life and the service of public
commerce, there may be some excesses in the purity and perspicacity of
our minds; that penetrating light has in it too much of subtlety and
curiosity: we must a little stupefy and blunt them to render them more
obedient to example and practice, and a little veil and obscure them, the
better to proportion them to this dark and earthly life. ”